Trust SummerFest music director Cho-Liang “Jimmy” Lin to have you leave the hall smiling — especially in a program like Wednesday’s “Bach & Beyond,” where he also gives you something to chew on.

Bach Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins and Strings, with Lin and Joseph Swensen as soloists, was the concert’s happy ending. But there was no getting around Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 3, which anchored the program, the first of three Wednesday-night Bach-themed concerts at Sherwood Auditorium. If you thought the provocative work by the eccentric 20th-century Russian master sounded as if he was trying to kill three centuries of classical music that had come before it, you might be right.

Written in 1985 in commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Bach’s birth, the work takes one of the prototypical forms of the Baroque era, the concerto grosso (in which a small group of instrumentalists, in this case a pair of violins, is pitted against a larger ensemble), and blows it up.

Rather than fitting perfectly, lines grate against one another, melodies are exploded into tiny fragments, conventional harmony is all but abandoned in favor of crunching dissonances.

Swensen (who was conducting), violin soloists Michelle Kim and Philippe Quint, and the SummerFest Chamber Orchestra were not about to back down from Schnittke’s demands, producing an intense, jarring interpretation. It was an intriguing contrast to the energetically rendered Bach Orchestral Suite No. 2 that came before it and the expertly played Mozart, Mendelssohn and Bach pieces that followed.

The Linden String Quartet — violinists Sarah McElravy and Catherine Cosbey, violinist Eric Wong and cellist Felix Umansky ﻿— is at SummerFest as one of two “fellowship” ensembles, but the members of the Linden proved Wednesday that they belong on the main stage. Their accounts of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C Minor and Mendelssohn’s Capriccio in E Minor were polished, passionate and persuasive.

In the Bach Concerto in D Minor for Two Violins, the Linden, with double bassist Timothy Pitts and harpsichordist Anthony Newman, provided backup for Lin and Swensen’s reunion. Friends and close colleagues at the Juilliard School of Music in the early 1970s, they made their Carnegie Hall debut together performing this piece, and this was the first time they had played it together since.

They seemed to relish the opportunity, and their high spirits were contagious. But it wasn’t quite enough to exorcise the memory of the Schnittke concerto and the questions it raised.

What’s our relationship to the past? Can you really silence it? How do we express ourselves in a way that’s authentic to our era?

Maybe it’s the best of both worlds: You left the concert humming Bach but thinking about Schnittke.